As the world of telecommunications, computer networking, and electronics continues to expand, the world as we know provides unprecedented access to information. Sitting in the glow of a computer screen, an individual can instantaneously access information on the opposite side of the planet by the Internet and other means. As companies continue to integrate such capabilities into more and more facets of their business, new and difficult challenges arise. In general, those with access to information are trustworthy and would never consider accessing and/or using information improperly. However, in the area of electronic commerce, credit card fraud and identity theft have become commonplace.
Such problems have spurred advances in the technology of securing data. Examples of such advances are the commonly-used secure sockets layer (SSL) and S-HTTP security mechanisms. Whereas SSL utilizes handshake-based key distribution with complex public key cryptography techniques, S-HTTP is designed to send individual messages securely. In either case, intermediaries in the process are not able to do more than simply move the incoming file to a subsequent destination, even though the intermediary is an integral part of the ongoing client-server relationship. Hence, the very nature of the security mechanisms presents limitations in that in order for an intermediary to have access, the access criteria must be duplicated in a complex and difficult to maintain manner.
Despite these advances, sensitive information is still commonly stolen and illicitly used. One area of weakness is the time when data is in transit and, particularly, in transit within a single entity or enterprise such as on an internal network. Similarly, as data passes between organizations, the data can be exposed by weak security measures and other infiltrations such as access data stolen from authorized personnel.